Just 10 short days from the previous release…

What’s new in this release:

• Privacy control, as promised last time. We are rather excited about this feature, as it has been requested by many of our users. More on this below.
• Importing of your contacts from other online services such as Google, or MSN, all nicely integrated in the welcome pages. We will make this feature available to existing users shortly.
• Enhanced invite dialog, with full history of your emails (including the ones imported with your contacts) and status of already invited people (screenshot below).
• Improved “My Friends” page for people that have not yet connected as friends with anyone on Zipalong. It makes it straightforward for the user to get started with their friends.
• Confirmation emails are now being sent via email when your friendship invite or trip join request is approved. So that you know.
• No longer change the map zoom level when centering the map on a picture, place, landmark, or note. It was an interesting idea to remember the zoom level the marker was placed at, but it ended up confusing people that didn’t know about it.
• And as always, a few bugs reported by some of our users got what they deserved.

This is the new invite dialog, with a contact highlighted in yellow to denote that he/she has already been invited.

Also, we now keep track of your contacts’ name, shown here in white.

Privacy

This is the first batch of privacy-related changes. It allows (as shown in the screenshot above) to change your account settings between Friends only, Member only, and Public.

By default your account has Members only visibility, which means that only Zipalong members can view your friends and your trips. If that is too loose for your taste, change it to Friends only. If you would like Google to index your account, change the privacy setting to Public.

Your trips automatically inherit your account privacy setting, with the additional feature of always being available to the other trip participants as well (regardless if they are your friends or not).

We are working on more granular privacy controls at the trip and picture level, and hope to land these feature in the next release (fingers crossed!).

Tags: friends, privacy, UI, welcome

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 1:50 am and is filed under Plans, Release. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.